Speakingrate,conversationalspeechacts,….pdfVIP

clinical linguistics phonetics, 2000 , vol. 14, no. 1, 25± 51 Speaking rate, conversational speech acts, interruption, and linguistic complexity of 20 pre-school stuttering and non-stuttering children and their mothers B R U C E P. RY A N Communicative Disorders Department, California State University, Long Beach, CA, USA (Received 5 June 1998; accepted 8 March 1999 ) Abstract This is the second in a series of reports concerning stuttering pre-school children enrolled in a longitudinal study; the ® rst was Ryan ( 1992 ) . Conversational samples of 20 stuttering and 20 non-stuttering pre-school children and their mothers were analysed f or speaking rate, conversational speech acts, interruption, and linguistic complexity. Between-group analyses revealed f ew di erences between either the two children or two mother groups. Within-group analyses indicated di erences that involved conversational speech acts and linguistic complexity. Most stuttering occurred on statements (M = 32.3% stuttered ) and questions (M = 20.9 % stuttered ) . Stuttered and dis¯ uent sentences had higher Developmental Sentence Scoring ( DSS) ( Lee, 1974 ) scores (M = 10.9, 12.9, respectively) than ¯ uent sentences (M = 7.6 ) . Multiple correlation analyses indi- cated that speaking rate of mothers ( 0.56 1) and normal dis¯ uency of children ( 0.396 ) were major predictor variables. Keywords: stuttering, children, mothers, interruption, language, speaking rate. Introduction This is the second in a series of reports concerning stuttering pre-school c